Intel 8th Generation Core i3 8350K and Core i5 8600K Review

Conclusion

If you’ve had even a passing acquaintance with computer technology then you will have heard of Moore’s Law. Originally to do with transistor counts it has mutated over time because transistor counts have moved into the billions and become less useful as a measure of computing ability. The modern interpretation of Moore’s Law is that computers either get twice as fast or half as expensive every two (ish) years.

Businesses have shareholders and shareholders very much want profits, so as a general rule companies would rather make their product faster for the same money, than churn out the same thing at a much lower price. But something that we’ve often referenced here at OC3D Towers, the trickle down effect, still occurs. So in the end we get the best of both Moore’s Law possibilities; there are cheap products as good as those from a couple of years ago, but for about the same amount of (inflation adjusted) money you can get something much better.

What has this to do with today’s review, we hear you ask. Well look at the facts.

Two years ago the top Core i3 you could buy was the i3-6300T. A 3.3 GHz dual core, its relative performance is low enough that it doesn’t get close to appearing on the bottom of our graphs. Today the i3-8350K is a 4 GHz quad core for approximately the same ownership fee. Moving across to the Core i5, the late 2015 model was the Core i5-6600, 3.3 GHz of quad core goodness that – like its i3 brethren – performs so poorly that it doesn’t appear on our graphs at all.

Even the most recent 7th Generation barely show up. Heck I’ve got a 6th Generation i7 and it’s only quad cores with HT, so the 8th Generation coming stomping across the battlegrounds to turn up with 4 GHz of clock speed and four cores in its i3 guise and six, SIX, cores available to the i5-8600K. Thus the latest 8th Generation i3 is easily as good as the previous generation i5, and the newest i5 is, hyperthreading aside, matching up to the i7-5930X or similarly beefy processors.

The big benefit to these new processors are the higher clock speeds and, as we saw from our overclocking testing, much more potential to push CPU clocks upto and past the 5 GHz mark when compared to the earlier processors they replace.

Intel have long been the main players in the processor market and the 8th Generation Intel Core i3-8350K and Core i5-8600K reinforce this position by being affordable, fast, high core CPUs that have the latest Intel 630 graphics on board and overclock like banshees. The fact you can install them into the very modern Z370 motherboards is only icing on the cake and they are definitely worth a look if you want bags of performance without stretching your budget to the Core i7 options.

Discuss your thoughts on the Intel 8th Generation CPUs on the OC3D Forums.